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Addis Ababa Mortality Surveillance Project (AAMSP)

The Addis Ababa Mortality Surveillance Project (AAMSP) is hosted by
Addis Ababa University and revolves around a surveillance of burials
at all known cemeteries of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Surveillance started
in 2001 and is ongoing. Basic socio-demographic information including
the lay report of the cause of death is collected for about 20,000
deaths a year. Verbal autopsy interviews are conducted with relatives
or caretakers of the deceased for a random sample of records. The data
that have been made available for public use pertain to the first five
years of the burial surveillance, including a set of adult verbal
autopsy interviews that were conducted in 2004. Ad-hoc data collection
initiatives (not included in this release) include a surveillance of
hospital deaths (2001), and a surveillance of hospital admissions
(incl. serostatus information) of patients admitted to the Zewditu
Memorial Hospital (2003).

Startup funding for the burial surveillance was provided by the
AIDS Foundation of Amsterdam (grant no. 7022) with additional
support from the WHO (Second Generation Surveillance on HIV/AIDS,
contract no. SANTE/2004/089-735). The 2004 round of verbal autopsy
interviews was made possible by a Mellon Foundation grant to the
Population Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
The continuation of the burial surveillance (not
included in this public use dataset) is supported by the Centers
for Disease Control.

Public Use Survey Data

The data in this public use release were collected and processed
with ethical clearance from the Addis Ababa University Faculty of
Medicine (Faculty Research and Publications Committee), the Ethiopian
Science and Technology Agency, the Institutional Review Board of
the University of Pennsylvania, the Research Ethics Review Committee
of the WHO and the Human Research Committee of the University of
Colorado at Boulder.

Data documentation provided with this release includes:

Burial surveillance codebook including the surveillance form that
is used at the burial sites

Notes about the 2004 round of verbal autopsies

Verbal autopsy questionnaires in Amharic (with a translation in English)

Acknowledgements

Please include the following statement in all publications that utilize
AAMSP data:

This research uses public use data from the Addis Ababa
Mortality Surveillance Project (AAMSP) and acknowledges the following
agencies that made these data available through grants and support:
the AIDS Foundation of Amsterdam (grant no. 7022), the WHO (Second
Generation Surveillance on HIV/AIDS, contract no. SANTE/2004/089-735),
the Mellon Foundation, the Population Studies Center at the University
of Pennsylvania, Addis Ababa University's School of Public Health, and
the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.